In The Flap of Wings, On My Tongue; Tenderness

for J

this is not a poem where Paul Simon dances in a bar, 
gets high and everyone foxtrots to his lead guitar

it is not about a radio from his childhood vying against 
the high laughter of his mother from another room 

or the ballad he wrote of a sky singing itself to sleep// 
I promise you this poem won’t have any laughter, any marijuana,

any radios, or anybody singing themselves into silence
//maybe this poem will be about names or the lack thereof

maybe this poem will be about fingers fishing colour from
a bed of flowers//maybe this poem will be about names//

sometimes, you go by Jay, but when your name is unfurled 
to its fullness, it means i hold the lord dear 

like a song keeping tenderness alive//the way an orchestra 
holds a sonata till it trickles to a coda and nothing is left 

but a cello praying for the miracle of fingers to make of it 
one last sostenuto; to make of it the shadow of a melody that was

//did you know there is a drug called Sonata and its side effects 
include lack of coordination and memory loss, and this forces me 

to stand in all bareness, like Adam on Creation morning, before 
the truth that melody is just another name for loss and a supplication 

for tenderness is a body trying in vain to pray its 
river-ness into viscosity// do I pile twelve stones, get me a lamb 

without blemish or two doves white before I can press my mouth 
to your ears to tell you of roses, chrysanthemums, aloe vera dying 

in its pot on a windowsill and innocence groveling before despots
//Jay, did you know there are birds called jays—when they are not 

flitting from bough to bough or adding grazioso to woodland 
symphony, they rip nuts from branches and each bird may 

hoard 3,000 to 5,000 acorns for winter// though they try, they do not 
remember to dig them all up and the ones left in the earth become oaks

become forests//bird scientists say they forget but I do not believe
I do not think this is a failure of the hippocampus// i think it is just 

the birds striving to cover the nakedness of earth// Adam ate of 
the fruit and knew his own nudity//maybe every bite of tenderness 

is a body stilling itself from dancing to the rhythm of its own bareness
//did you know jays have blue markings on their wings and the world 

knows them as just that—markings//but i never stop wondering 
how a bird carries scintillas of the sky on its own body// 

how does tenderness hold fragments of God so well in itself without 
the breakage known to bodies holding the divine; without crashing 

to earth in a flurry of feathers//in a church I used to attend,
there was a scene of the Last Supper in stained glass 

high up where everyone could see; the Lord giving of his own body, 
The Twelve holding fragments of him to their lips without combusting, 

and light washing them through//one Sunday, we met them on the floor
—Christ, his Apostles and their unleavened loaves—in smithereens//

cops ruled out iconoclasm and as the priest said Mass, 
unfiltered sunlight streamed onto the organ and the tenderness of the 

pipes streamed into our bodies//in the churchyard, some guy 
with squeaky clean shoes would later step out from his Mercedes 

and call it thermal expansion and I think that is a fancy way of saying 
tenderness cannot hold the divine without breaking, without bowing 

beneath the weight of its beauty//yet and yet still, a little bird holds 
God on its own plumage; and the calling of a name wraps the Lord 

around the tongue and nothing happens, nothing but sacredness 
reveling in garbs of tenderness//nothing but something without a name.  



Onyekachi Iloh is a writer, poet and visual artist exploring photography as a means of documentation, and the  re-examination of sight. A winner of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren MagazineWelterSingapore UnboundBlue Marble ReviewPalette Poetry and elsewhere.